The scale in this spart of the city is a bit disorienting. Everywhere ekse so far has been comfortable; plenty of tall buildings but for the most part nothing like in a “big” city. This city is big, but because there’s nothing surrounding it it’s been able to spread outwards rather than upwards. Except here. Urbs speculorum, the “city of glass”. It’s named after the towering glass skyscrapers that rise above everything else in the city, even Apollo’s temple on the mountain. I haven’t been able to find out what it was called before they were built, though.
I spend some days going through the libraries, reading up on some of the myths peculiar to the area, myths centering around gods that I’m familiar with and have been since childhood, but stories I’ve never heard. Most interestingly, there’s even stories of gods from entirely different cultures interacting, like Thoth and Morpheus.
Morpheus in particular is interesting, because asides from some pop cultural references he was never a particularly powerful or widely worshipped god in his time. And yet here he’s been elevated to the core pantheon – I must remember to look into how he rose to such prominence while I’m here.
Even more interestingly, it looks like this myth has gained in popularity in the past couple years (taking advantage of the library’s network, tracking which books are checked out or cross-referenced in journals or on the net). The story’s pretty vague, though. It’s only really mentioned in passing, and I can’t seem to find the original anywhere… so why the popularity?